October 15, 2007

Wild about 'Mad Men': A talk with creator Matthew Weiner

For all its ups and downs and long delays between seasons, it wasn't easy to let go of "The Sopranos." When the landmark HBO series finally called it quits June 10, fans of quality cable TV had to wonder if we would ever meet another set of memorable characters who would so completely ensnare us in their unique and mesmerizing world.

On July 19, we had our answer.

"Mad Men," a stylish series about the men and women of Manhattan’s advertising world in the 1960s, arrived like a brightly wrapped present. Unwrapping this beguiling treasure, which has its Season 1 finale at 9 p.m. Thursday on AMC, has been one of 2007’s most unexpected and rewarding delights.

The remarkably assured "Mad Men" — by far my favorite new show of the year — has created a world with all the moral complexity of "The Sopranos" and fascinating characters whose depths were only obliquely glimpsed at first. As Don Draper, the charismatic yet reserved ad man at the heart of the series, Jon Hamm has given a performance of breathtaking vulnerability. Like "Sopranos" star James Gandolfini, Hamm has brought an indescribable charisma to an ambiguous, complicated role.

We learn that this inscrutable ad executive had purposefully left behind everyone he’d ever known in his youth and had even given up his real name — and it is that heartbreaking personal history that has made him an advertising genius. Draper understands the longing for a past that never was, and he is deeply familiar with unquenchable desire (which fuels his frequent infidelity).

As he well knows, advertising is the business of catering to — and creating — desire, and he has few equals in that department.

In the beautifully crafted season finale, Draper is told to come up with a campaign for Kodak’s unglamorous new slide projector. The company wants an approach that plays up the machine’s unusual "circle" slide-holder.

"They want you to put the words ‘research and development’ into the ads," Draper is told by another executive at the Sterling Cooper advertising firm.

But instead of dreaming up an ad touting the product’s nuts and
bolts, Draper comes up with a poignant pitch about what pictures — and
the past — mean to us. It has at least one man in the room in tears,
and the rest are stunned into silence.

It’s another bravura performance from Draper, who understands that
advertising is the business of telling people what they want to hear –
reassuring them that, as he put it to cigarette executives in the
show’s first episode, “you will be OK.”

"If you’ve ever had somebody try to sell you something — people who
can sell, they really are not manipulating you. They are selling
themselves," says creator Matthew Weiner, a former writer for "The
Sopranos." "When it comes from a personal place like that, it’s not
some vapid manipulation, which doesn’t work. … I definitely think that
we believe Don is good at what he does because we know it means
something to him."

Though the stories of Don Draper and the other characters have their
poignant moments, Weiner says his goal is not just to "make people pay
attention" but to entertain them. And he’s done it with emotionally
resonant storytelling recalling "The Sopranos" at its best.

How many times did the actions of those characters surprise us, yet were in keeping
with what we’d learned about them? It was a sickening shock when Tony
Soprano killed Christopher Moltisanti in the final season. But given
what we’d seen of Tony’s calculating, brutal side, it wasn’t really a
surprise.

Though there’s no murder on "Mad Men," that element of surprise,
married to a deeply nuanced view of human nature, is part of what makes
the series so richly rewarding. While the immersion in the politically
incorrect past brings its own electrical charge to the proceedings,
once you get past the bullet bras and the skinny ties, it’s really a
show about conflicted, contradictory, real people.

"What David [Chase, creator of ‘The Sopranos’] was always really
into was: ‘What is the most interesting thing going on here?’. " Weiner
said in a recent phone interview. "Like with a sex scene — we could
show sex on ‘The Sopranos.’ But still, David knew immediately … you
have to make people pay attention" by sometimes diverging from the
expected path.

As Weiner learned from Chase and demonstrates so beautifully on "Mad
Men," what makes us sit up and take notice are those moments when
preconceptions are subverted with compelling plot twists or digressions
that delve into unexpected emotional territory.

"I don’t fight for your attention," Weiner says. "What I’m trying to
do when I draw [viewers] in is say, put your checkbook down, turn off
the phone, watch it on TiVo when you know the kids won’t be around. And
really let yourself go into this world, but take it seriously."

Even the comic plots are based on a realistic view of the workplace —
of any era. Draper finds out in one episode that his arrogant boss,
Roger Sterling (John Slattery), has made a pass at his wife. He lures
Sterling out for a long, liquid lunch, and arranges for the office
elevators to be out of service. After several dozen plates of oysters,
a drunk Sterling has to climb more than 20 floors to get back to the
office, and soon embarrasses himself by vomiting in front of a client.

"You have this plot that’s a revenge plot, which is based on the
reality that you cannot punch your boss," Weiner says. "You can’t. You
can on TV, but you can’t on this TV show, because we’re following those
rules" of real life.

Another of the show’s joys is its measured, even contemplative pace,
which makes “Mad Men” a distinct contrast to more conventional dramas,
which often rely on energetic editing, fervent melodrama and speedy
dialogue to keep viewers’ interest.

The characters on “Mad
Men” pause before they speak. The camera on the show, which employs
several “Sopranos” alums behind the scenes, follows them as they cross
rooms. Even props get loving attention. Expertly staged comic bits are
tossed off with relaxed ease, as when Draper and Sterling purposely decline to notice to junior
executives coming to blows in a corner of the office at the end of one
workday.

One of the first season’s most shocking – and
entertaining – moments literally blew viewers away. The Sept. 13
episode focused, in part, on the deeply repressed rage of Draper’s
naïve, beautiful wife, Betty (January Jones), who’d gotten a job as a
model but was quickly fired thanks to ad-agency politics.

The final scene began with the image of birds flying overhead – a
flock of pigeons kept by the Drapers’ cranky neighbor. Perhaps the
birds would serve as a melancholy, symbolic stand-in for Betty, who
often felt caged herself.

But viewers expecting tasteful symbolism in the manner of ’50s director
Douglas Sirk were in for a shock. Betty, with a cigarette dangling from
her lip, came out her prim suburban home with a BB gun and blasted away
at the birds.

“On some level, a lot of what I’m doing is trying to not do a typical
TV show,” Weiner says. “One of the things I really wanted to show was
that she’s not conscious of what she’s doing a lot of the time. And
she’s lying to herself about what she’s doing.”

As Weiner points out, Betty “is not just some feminist symbol, she’s a person who made choices in her life.”

Sometimes the characters’ choices are not what you would expect,
because human nature is not as predictable as more conventional dramas
would have you believe.

At first glance, Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt), a closeted gay art
director at Sterling Cooper, appears to be the ultimate Manhattan
sophisticate. Nothing would faze this dapper, worldly man — or so you
might think. But Romano freezes up when a client makes a subtle but
unmistakable pass at him, and quickly flees the scene.

"I knew I wanted Sal to be tempted," Weiner says. "But then I
started thinking, ‘Well, what does Sal know so far? Who is Sal? Is Sal
ready for this? And what does the audience expect?’"

As Weiner says, the drama would have far less impact if the characters’ actions didn’t have very real consequences. Draper lives in fear of being revealed as a fraud. Despite her husband’s infidelity, Betty is terrified at the prospect of losing her home and her marriage, having never fended for herself. And for Sal Romano, a gay man in 1960, the consequences of being outed at work would be severe, if not catastrophic.

“The guy says, ‘What are you afraid of? And Sal says, ‘Are you joking?’ Like, ‘My whole life is at stake here.’ And that is never taken seriously,” Weiner says. “The same way [infidelity] is never taken seriously – what would really happen if you were having an affair and your wife found out and you could lose your whole life? I went out of my way on an episode level to tell those stories with that in mind.”

Weiner’s dedication to multilayered, compassionate storytelling
has paid off — in a year of strong debuts from several new cable
series, "Mad Men" has received many of the most effusive reviews. And
though the show only has a cult audience of about a million or so
viewers at this point, many have incomes of more than $100,000, a fact
that AMC touted in its September press release about the show’s renewal
for a second season.

AMC executives “deserve the credit for having the stomach to” go with a cast of mostly unknown actors, Weiner says. “They bought what they liked. There were no focus groups, no testing. They said, ‘This is the kind of show we want to watch.’”

As for the second season, Weiner says he hasn’t decided yet what year it will be set in.

"We will come in at a place where there is more story to tell," he
says. The show, which ends its first season just after the election of
John F. Kennedy, won’t start up again "where we left off, that’s for
sure."

What follows is the transcript of my interview with Matt Weiner. A little bit of slightly spoiler-y information about the finale and Season 2 came up in the interview, but I've taken those things out of the main body of the interview. That stuff is at the very end of the post, and I will give you a spoiler alert before that point. By the way, a couple of my earlier pieces on the show are here and here.

One of the great things about the show is not knowing where it’ll end up. It’s like you’re on this ride with these people – anything could happen.

“That ‘Long Weekend’ episode, one of the things I’m most proud of, and [this applies to] a lot of episodes, is that you can go back and look at the first frame of that show and have no idea where you’re going to go. You can’t even believe it’s the same episode.”

That’s what is so entertaining – it’s constantly surprising me. But then again, that part of makes me think, How do I write about this show? What can I say about it? I don't know where to start.

“I love intellectual analysis of the show, it’s fantastic. But I’m an entertainer. and I always feel like, whether you mean to or not, there is always some slight [indication] that you are talking about the fact that it hits you in your life. It emotionally hits you. You feel for these people and it’s gotten to you. And that’s what I’m always trying to do. People have talked about the plots and everything like that, and I’m like, ‘The stakes are very high on the show because it’s realistic, because these are realistic problems for these people.’”

I mean, Betty with the shotgun [in ‘Shoot’] – that blew my mind. I thought you were going to end on this elegiac note – you know, here’s some Douglas Sirk symbolism with the birds flying away, there’s going to be a tasteful, melancholy scene. But out comes Betty, with a cigarette in her mouth, blasting away at the pigeons.

“That’s from my writers’ assistant, Robin Veith, she wrote [the finale] with me. I am making her a writer next year on the show. That was her mom. She was a latchkey kid. And she told me the story, about her mom and the dog and the pigeons they were latchkey kids. And I said, I’m going to work backward to make that happen. That is the greatest symbol of motherhood, of frustration.

“[Robin’s] mom saw the show and her mom had blocked it out. And when she talked to her mom about it, her mom was embarrassed about it. She said, ‘I’m a horrible mother.’ And Robin said, ‘No, you’re the greatest mom in the world.’”

It seems like Don wanted a mother like that – he wanted the childhood and the home and the mother he didn’t have.

“Absolutely. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to be.”

But would it be wrong to say, he wanted a mother, but with Betty, he got a child?

“I don’t think that’s wrong at all. But one of the things I love about the way Betty has developed is, she’s not a symbol. She’s a person. Don is a very traditional person. In that scene in [‘Shoot’] where he lets her lie to him – he knows she’s been fired [from a modeling job], and he says, ‘You have a job.’ He means it. He’s literally saying, ‘Don’t go looking elsewhere, this is it.’

“But Betty, and what I love about her not being a symbol is – this is a woman who has built her identity on her looks, and on what she’s been told to do. So what you’re getting is someone who married this man, and he gave her everything, and she did what she was told, and she is basing her self-esteem on her looks, and that’s very, very rocky ground.

“So she’s not just some feminist symbol, she’s a person who made choices in her life, she’s not just some object representation of how horrible it is. Because that job, being housewife and mother, that was the job. She had the best job, a handsome husband with a huge income, a house in the country, two kids.

“You’re absolutely right, I think he did get a child. Part what I did with Glenn Bishop [the young son of a divorced neighbor on Betty’s street], with that kid and the hair and everything, part of that was supposed to say to you, these people are the same age. She’s too young for that job.”

I actually had a hard time with the character. I didn’t know what it was, whether it was the actor or the character or what, but I couldn’t really get a handle on her. Then I got this email from a reader, a psychiatrist, who was diagnosing what’s he thought going on with her. And he said something that I thought was interesting, that made sense – Betty’s life is a performance. She’s acting all the time. And she doesn’t know how not to do that.

“That’s absolutely true. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I know that, on some level. You know, this sounds really craven on some level, but on some level, a lot of what I’m doing is trying to not do a typical TV show. But I also think about TV. One of the things I really wanted to show was that she’s not conscious of what she’s doing a lot of the time. And she’s lying to herself about what she’s doing.

“When Don talks to the shrink in the episode with the washing machine [‘Indian Summer’], to me he’s saying ‘I can’t leave her alone’ [because part of him wants to be free of that responsibility]. She told him about the air-conditioning man because she wanted [Don] to have sex with her. And his reaction was – he’s thinking about leaving with this other woman. What he’s saying is, ‘I can’t leave her alone. I want her to be more stable, more put together, so I can leave her.’

“But that’s not what you hear on TV. You hear, ‘How do I get out of this. Do I have enough money?’”

You not doing that, not doing the obvious, that’s part of the reason the show’s getting so much attention. To me, it’s an immersive experience. It’s not about the plot, in some ways, though that’s important too. But there’s so much stuff that washes over you.

“And it’s tense, right?”

Yeah.

“It’s almost unnoticeable on the show, but we have this amazing composer [David Carbonara] who creates tension where you don’t expect it.”

Is it me or was the score a little more prominent in the last few episodes?

“I use music in places where there’s not a lot of talking. So I would say, as we’ve been sort of paying off the plots, there’s been a lot of talking, [so when the music comes in it may be more noticeable]. But also I started having more confidence in how it added to the story and did not force people to feel. And [the composer has] written new cues for some people.”

[We digressed into a discussion of one scene in Thursday’s finale, which Weiner directed.]

That scene in the finale wrapped up what the show does so well – it’s not about selling toothpaste. It’s about speaking to people’s deepest longing to belong, to feel wanted and to feel satisfied. That’s why Don is at the top of his game – he gets that longing and that wanting.

“If you’ve ever had somebody try to sell you something – people who can sell, they really are not manipulating you. They are selling themselves. And there is nothing that is more valuable. If they’re using themselves, there’s nothing like it. You’re like, ‘Yes!’ He says it in the scene, it’s an itch and the product is calamine lotion. That’s what I was trying to do.

“And also, that’s what I always said – in the pilot, that Lucky Strike scene where he says, ‘You are OK,’ the direction to the actor was [that he says the line] ‘almost to himself.’ What he was saying to himself was, ‘I made it through this pitch,’ but also ‘I don’t want to sell the death wish. I want to sell people what I want to hear, which is, “I’m going to be OK.”’

“So when it comes from a personal place like that, it’s not some vapid manipulation, which doesn’t work. We all know when we’re being manipulated. That’s my philosophy anyway. I don’t know how great a salesman I am. But I definitely think that we believe Don is good at what he does because we know it means something to him.”

When you’re thinking about the writing of the show, do you think first about what’s going on in a character’s head or mind or soul, or are you thinking about, ‘I need to get to this plot point?’ Or is it both?

“Well, first of all the plots are very elaborate. They are real plots. They are like the plots we did on ‘The Sopranos.’ I hide it a lot. I hide it the way they do on ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘The Sopranos.’ By saying here’s the show, it starts off and you think it’s going to be about this, but it’s about that.

“A perfect example is the vomiting show [‘Red in the Face’], when the boss was coming over to dinner. What we learn on the way to the boss coming over to dinner is that the boss is older than Don, and that Don is already more attracted to other women – we see that at the bar. And then it becomes this issue about masculinity, which is also reflected in the Pete [chip-and-dip bowl] story, [it’s] a thematic thing.

“You have this plot that’s a revenge plot, which is based on the reality that you cannot punch your boss. You can’t. You can on TV, but you can’t on this TV show, because we’re following those rules.

“When Pete blackmails Don [in ‘Nixon vs. Kennedy’], one of the things I’m most proud of with that episode is, I said, I’m going to do this for real. How would you do that? It’s really hard to do, to blackmail another person. You see it on TV all the time, envelopes are exchanged and violence is threatened. But in most cases, people don’t murder each other. For the most part, people are like, ‘How can I get out of this?’ and how does the other person actually do [the blackmailing]?

“So I have a plot, and then I try to avoid the lie of – I wouldn’t say the lie of TV, it’s a dramatic lie, often, of trying to escalate it to such a huge proportion that it somehow [false]. They always say, ‘raise the stakes’ but if the stakes are in a real world, [they don’t need to be raised in a melodramatic way].

“If you’re really worried about Don’s relationship with Betty, then her finding that phone bill is a serious piece of tension. Whereas in a normal [show] – on ‘Desperate Housewives,’ people find that all the time, and then all the drama is them throwing [things] at each other. So I try to take that stuff seriously, and the way I approach story, usually is, I have incidents and I have a theme and I try to approach it from character. How is that person going to behave in those circumstances?

“With Sal [the closeted gay man who fled a potential romantic encounter in ‘The Hobo Code’], I knew I wanted Sal to be tempted. But then I started thinking – well, what does Sal know so far? Who is Sal? Is Sal ready for this? And what does the audience expect?

“I mean, this really trivializes the show, but I think a lot of what draws people into [the show is akin to when] someone’s expecting a phone call and they walk into the room and the phone is ringing but they don’t answer it right away. They don’t want to know what it is. Which is the way we are. I thought I knew what would happen with Sal, based on what most other TV dramas would do with that story. I didn’t what did happen coming – I didn’t think that he would essentially just run away. It was a surprise – but it made sense.

“And he has a really good reason too. The guy says, ‘What are you afraid of? And Sal says, ‘Are you joking?’ Like, ‘My whole life is at stake here.’ And that is never taken seriously. The same way it’s never taken seriously – what would really happen if you were having an affair and your wife found out and you could lose your whole life? I went out of my way on an episode level to tell those stories with that in mind.

“You see the whole pilot, it’s all in the office, it’s all about Don solving a problem, and then you find out he’s married. And we keep dealing with that, and you see he has a real relationship with that woman. I’m interested in how people get trapped and it’s typified in the fifties, but it happens now too – where you have a list of things you think you need to make you happy. You don’t really think about how you got them or what they’re for.

“With Betty, we fight that TV thing [of pretending she’s not gorgeous]. Instead of pretending that she’s just somebody’s wife, everybody knows she’s exceptionally beautiful. And that’s unusual. January Jones is not just playing the regular housewife. No one is pretending like she’s not a knockout.

[There was a discussion of what happens with Betty in the finale; that part of the interview is at the end of this post.]

“She’s very angry the whole season. Shooting the pigeons, slapping Helen. But what I love about it is, you can also look at it and say, this is not just ‘The Feminine Mystique.’ This is a woman who has relied, for whatever reasons, on her looks, she is building on sand, she has married a man she does not know, because he had everything and gave her everything and now all of a sudden, that does not feel great.

“I think people on a TV show would have preferred that she have multiple sclerosis. ‘Oh, she’s got this illness and her husband’s ignoring her illness,’ instead of the fact that, her hands went numb because she saw a divorced woman having to do [stuff] by herself. On some level, psychologically, she says, ‘I don’t want that to be me.’

That’s one of the things that the show does well – dealing with the words that aren’t spoken, the things that go unsaid. But they’re there.

“And I can only do that because the audience is [seeing a lot of this world]. It goes to the pace you were talking about – there are a lot of private moments on the show. They cost more to shoot, it’s 30 seconds of silence, it could be five or six shots, it costs the same as five pages. But those private moments inform [everything else]. One of the scenes I’m most proud of is when [Betty tells Don she’s quitting a modeling job]. We know what Don knows, and we know what Betty knows, and nothing as said. The only thing that is revealed that cuts both ways for us is when she says, ‘I don’t like the city on my own, it’s harsh.’

“I think Don is looking for his mother, and I do think that he loves Betty and that was the thing I really strived for from the second episode on. He comes home from [having sex with] his mistress, and Betty’s been in this low-speed car accident, where she’s not injured at all, and the first thing is, he starts attacking her, out of guilt or whatever. For her driving, for her desire to see a shrink, all of this stuff. He’s right, he gave her everything, how could she have a problem? And that’s very male.”

The way “Mad Men” is shot, edited and the whole rhythm of the show – it’s just different from what I’m seeing on TV right now.

What David [Chase, creator of ‘The Sopranos’] was always really into was – what is the most interesting thing going on here? Like with a sex scene – we could show sex on ‘The Sopranos. But still, David knew immediately, as do I and people who are really, really interested in telling a story that delights the audience in some way and draws them in – you have to make people pay attention. Immediately, you’re already talking about [the audience] paying attention to different things than they’re used to paying attention to. Like you said, you can recap the plot in a few lines, but you don’t know what it’s going to be. John Slattery said to me how inevitable everything feels – even though you’re surprised.”

That’s exactly it.

“Here’s an example of that. We know Don and Rachel are going to get together at some point. We’re hoping that they do. One on level the TV rule says, this is the one woman he can’t have, because she’s going to stand up to him because she has morals and she knows she’s from a different world.

“On the other hand, there’s this magnificent reality which is, that guy is really handsome, really charismatic, and when he comes over with this existential crisis after his friend has a heart attack and he sees his friend with his family and he calls his wife and she doesn’t give him what he needs. He comes over to her apartment and the way it’s traditionally done is, he would walk in, she says, ‘I heard about Roger,’ and he kisses her, and we cut to them on the couch after they make love.

“What I wanted to do was show the reality of the situation, which is that she is going to require – if she’s the character we’ve seen the entire season – a tremendous amount of convincing, even if she wants it. Probably in the original draft, there were four opportunities for her to end this thing. And we keep hoping both that she won’t do it and that she will do it. And when she did it, I didn’t want it to seem like he forced himself on her.”

That’s he key moment of the scene is where he says, “Tell me you want it.” And that’s what makes interesting. Rachel would be that fearful, Don would do that – make sure she did it out of her own free will. What happens springs from who these characters are, not from what the plot needs them to do.

“Right. I hope that’s what it is. And part of that taking a lot of stuff seriously that TV shows don’t take seriously. Don’s relationship with his wife is taken seriously. His children are taken seriously – his daughter having that nightmare means that Betty was not a good mom because she had someone else watching the kids. You have a sister, right?”

Yes.

“Rachel talks to her sister, she tells her about Don, she tells her that he’s married. And she says, ‘Nothing’s happened,’ when we just saw them in bed the scene before. You would never tell your sister that! On a TV show, people do. Because it makes everything easier. That makes it harder to tell the story, when another character doesn’t just say, ‘Well, I know.’ Because you’re the writer, you know everything. But those characters don’t. And that, I hope, is what is drawing people in.

“The truth is, I think the biggest difference between this and a lot of what’s on TV now is – and I will tell you right now, it hasn’t always been this way – TV is an escape for people in a different way. It’s an escape that reconfirms [that your life is OK]. I am not reconfirming that you are OK. I am reconfirming that you are having a hard time.

“So part of that requires, more than anything, when you’re telling people a story that they don’t know -- they find it frustrating if they’re not paying attention. What I’m trying to do when I draw them in is say, put your checkbook down, turn off the phone, watch it on TiVo when you know the kids won’t be around. And really let yourself go into this world but take it seriously.

“That has been the most satisfying thing about the critics’ response to it – [the appreciation from] a bunch of people who are having to rip through all of these TV shows and saying ‘This is what they’re doing, they’re doing this version of that.’ And by the way, I love TV. Like, the formula of ‘Law & Order’ or ‘CSI’ – it’s Agatha Christie. There’s going to be a murder, he’s going to gather people together in the study. I love that stuff. How is going to figure it out is still the mystery.

“But with this thing, you don’t know [where it’s going to end up]. At the beginning of ‘Long Weekend,’ Don loses an account. You don’t know that that’s going to end up with them locked in this building, possibly having sex with these twins. You don’t know that.

But see, that’s what you’ve hit on – there are so many shows where we do know what’s going to happen. It’s so interesting to have a show where you don’t know what’s coming up. When you created these layered people and take them seriously, like you’re saying – what they do has real repercussions, and not always in ways you expect. And the repercussions can happen weeks later. It’s not necessarily five minutes later.

“In the episode ‘5G,’ Peggy finds out Don has a mistress. So the next day, his wife comes in, but Peggy doesn’t know where he is, and she’s thinking he’s with the mistress. And there are all of these stakes there – all of this fear about the wife finding out. But the audience knows he’s with the brother. On another TV show, he would be with the other woman. It would have been good, but it’s not as good.”

I think there’s a thing that’s happened with the TV audience – people who know and love really great TV have a higher discernment level. But it can be hard, especially with the latest batch of network shows, to find shows that meet that level – where you’re not just getting a variation on a formula, where your preconceptions are messed with, but in a good way.

“I don’t want to [dump] on other TV, but there’s a very technical thing with our show. I don’t fight for your attention. I do in the sense that if you don’t pay attention, you’ll have no idea what’s going on and be bored.

“You can [speed up] all of these shows up tremendously up by overlapping the dialogue. And what that means is, when someone’s talking, the other person starts talking over them, and it gets the story out faster.

“What you get in this show is, people talk, you’re on [the speaker] in the shot, and – it’s actually very old fashioned. You may see [the second person] listening, when the other person is talking. And then they will take a moment, the way you do, [then respond]. Part of this is because of the dialogue is so elevated, and it’s like, no one is this smart [laughs]. No one can think of this [stuff] this fast. They’re a little smarter than regular people, but that’s entertainment, right?

“The actors help me too, the actors are so natural. A line where John Slattery says, ‘My father always said, having a client is like a marriage, sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons and eventually you get slapped in the face.’ He laughed after he said that, as the character. Well, there you go. It’s, ‘I am telling a funny story,’ as opposed to being some Noel Coward super-witty guy.” Who’s just reeling off these lines.

“Exactly. They’re listening to each other and when the scenes are written, characters are not just serving each other. It’s like, ‘I’m not just here for you to get this piece of plot out.’

“When Peggy and Joan are talking in ‘5G,’ and Peggy says, ‘What do I do?’ and Joan keeps saying, ‘Where is he?’ Then Peggy finally tells her and Joan says, ‘You should not have told me that.’ That’s totally real. Joan wants to know what Don is up to. She doesn’t care about the rest of it. It’s an old problem, these guys disappear all the time.

“But technically, the idea of staying on the people when they’re talking to each other, and making them listen to each other and keeping the agenda for each of them, especially if you know what they don’t – that is where, unlike a certain style of TV, I am not fighting for your attention. I am no trying to grab you three seconds into it and saying, ‘Don’t change the channel no matter what!’

“I am trying to say, ‘Watch this, and you will be rewarded. Watch this. Pay attention.’ It costs us a lot of money to shoot stuff. When I spend three seconds showing you a prop, that is for your delight. I am not telling you that the Relaxacizor is going to be used to murder someone. I am telling you, ‘Look at this strange underwear that she’s going to put on!’”

“But I’m not bashing TV. I have every kind of ‘Law & Order’ on my TiVo.”

I know what you mean. But the assumption has to be that shows have to be worth people’s time. People don’t have a ton of time for TV, that’s always my assumption. So what they do invest in – they want it to be really good. Nobody has the time to sit around watching 20 hours of TV a day.

“That isn’t what you do?”

No, people think that’s what I do, and I have to disillusion them.

“I don’t want to hear that’s not what you do. I don’t want to hear that. [Laughs] That’s what I did in college. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid.”

What?

“My father and mother are really into TV. But I was such a terrible student that I was always being punished. We weren’t allowed to watch during the week, and the first thing that went away [as a punishment] was TV. So I’m probably one of the only people you know who’s seen every episode of ‘Quincy,’ because it was on at 3 in the afternoon in Connecticut, where I went to college.” So you’ve seen the punk-rock episode of “Quincy”?

“I’ve seen ’em all. [laughs] I told Linda, my wife, we got in a fight and I said, ‘You know what, I can kill you with a frozen hot dog. No one will ever know. I saw it on “Quincy.”’

I remember watching the old “Superman” show after school and my mom pleading with me to go outside and play, and I was like, “What? But I don’t know if Superman’s going to stop the guy with the atomic lasers!”

“You know what, I think that forbidden-fruit aspect of TV, that is what I’m trying to do with this thing. To say, 'Carve out the time. Spend the time with it.'

“There is a very conscious attitude in the creation of the sequence [of the show] – the first episode, you find out that he’s married. Then in the second episode you meet his wife and you find out the affair is ongoing, it’s not a one-time thing, that it has an effect on his wife and they have a real marriage. The third episode sets the stage, and I am telling [viewers], you never know where you’re going to be in this show [at Don’s home or at the office or elsewhere]. Don has this thing going on with Rachel, and he carries it home with him. Don has a life as a human being that he’s trying to rectify. We’re taking all of these things seriously.

“Pete has a very sympathetic story, where we meet his parents. When Betty is with that little boy, and then she says the shrink, ‘The person who’s taking care of him is not doing a good job,’ we know she’s talking about herself. Once you’ve established that language for the show, you are rewarding people for paying attention.

“I am serving the plot, but I hide it. Before Peggy puts on the Relaxacizor, Peggy's roommate comes in, and says, ‘You’ve been eating all the food.’ And Peggy lies about having friends over. And then her roommate says, ‘I don’t know why you keep working when you get home. When I get home I’m done.’ So we have another piece of information about Peggy – which is that she’s an ambitious person who’s really working hard. We only know one other person like that on the show, and that’s Don. The guy who’s talking to the guy in the bar [in the pilot] about smoking.”

“In Episode 12 [‘Kennedy vs. Nixon’], he comes back from being rebuffed by Rachel, and he’s like a little boy, he seems like he’s five years old. She even says, ‘What are you, 15?’ He comes back to the office, and Betty’s crying in there. And she takes him out of himself. And he goes, ‘OK, here drink this.’ That is the stuff, where it’s not convenient for the story – it turns out it is – but you know, the plot is, Peggy convinces Don to stand up to Pete. But that’s not the way it comes off. It comes off like, Don is in a panic and Peggy’s in the way.”

In another show, with Don and Pete, they’d get into it right away. But in life, it’s more of a process – Don has to go from A to B to C to F. And then he knows what to do.

“We exhaust every possibility. In action movies, it’s about getting the person into a spot where they literally have nothing else to do, and that’s when you don’t know what’s going to happen. And I try to do that over and over again.”

There’s that great scene in ‘5G’ where Don’s going to see his brother, and you don’t know if he’s going to kill him or just visit him or what. And this is where I compare Hamm’s work to James Gandolfini’s performance in ‘The Sopranos’ – you really don’t know what this guy is capable of. It could go either way.

“But you also, even more importantly – you have a hope, because you identify with him, that he will do the right thing. And you also have a hope that he’ll kill him, because you want [Don] out of the problem.”

Yeah, you’re complicit with Don every step of the way. And that was the great thing about “The Sopranos.” David Chase turns it around and puts the mirror on you and says, “You wanted him to kill someone. You wanted him to do that bad thing.”

“That episode, at the end of the second season, where Janice kills Richie -- you think Tony’s going to kill him before that. People don’t remember this, but Richie’s in a lot of trouble and he’s fighting Tony. And then Janice out of nowhere, shoots him. Not out of nowhere, he hits her. And Tony mops up and puts her on a bus and comes home and Carmela’s there, you see this domestic scene and you know where he’s been.

“And they have this song by Eurythmics, or it might just be Annie Lennox, where she sings, ‘I saved the world today.’ When I saw that, I didn’t feel the TV sense of, ‘There’s justice in the world.’ I felt like, ‘That guy solved the problem.’ Like in [the ‘Sopranos’ episode] ‘College,’ when he’s there and he’s waiting for her interview at the end. It’s a weird thing to say, we are that person.

“Jon Hamm, whatever it is about that man, and it’s not just because he’s handsome and it’s not just because he’s a good actor – he has a quality… I hate [Don] sometimes, and I like to see his temper and I like to see him be cruel to Pete, and I like to see him stand up for what’s right, in a weird way he’s a very moral person in a lot of instances. Whatever quality he has keeps me from saying, ‘Screw him. I don’t care what happens to him, he’s not me and he deserves what he’s getting.’”

But there’s a quality with him that you were talking about, that the show has as well – he’s not fighting for your attention. There’s something going on there, but he’s not in your face. You have to pay attention. There’s a reserve there.

“We were very lucky. The fact that he was free, the fact that he was at that point in his life. The fact that he comes from a background – whatever [Hamm] reveals about himself or not, he is a person who understands that guy.” But was it a fight to cast him, to cast the show the way you did?

“No. We agreed that, like the ‘Sopranos’ – and I’m not going to pretend that it’s not the template for everything we’re trying to do on the show, even though this show is different – I said, and the network was on board with this, we were going to cast unknowns. That’s not meant to be insulting to the actors, they’ve all worked a lot but they’re unknown. When you do that, it’s a great thing to say, because the character is that person to the audience.

“The downside of it is, it requires a very strong stomach. Because a name brand, or a famous person, can bring you so much. It can give the audience so much to latch on to. Go see ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ and whatever you think of the story or anything else – I’ll watch Russell Crowe with his handcuffs on walking behind a horse, doing nothing, for 15 minutes. I don’t know why, but I will.

“So the fact that in the first 47 minutes of the show, the fact that we were able to make Don that guy – Jon Hamm brought that.”

Was he always the guy? Was it ever between him and someone else?

“He was the guy. All I had to say to the [network] was, let’s really, really go with an unknown. And they obviously, they took a gamble.

“AMC believed in this show and they believed in this project. They paid for the [$2.5 million] pilot themselves, and if [producing partner] Lionsgate had not come along and bought the show, [AMC would have been out that money]. They deserve the credit for having the stomach to do that. They bought what they liked. There were no focus groups, no testing. They said, ‘This is the kind of show we want to watch.’”

Did you make any course corrections as you were writing the first season?

“Yeah, there was a big course correction. I had broken the first six episodes, I know Don’s whole story, and I’m hiding it from the office and his wife – but I am hiding it from the audience too. I wrote ‘5G’ [which was episode 5] after we already had scripts for ‘Babylon’ and ‘Hobo Code’ [which were episodes 6 and 8]. I went back and wrote ‘5G’ and we shot it.

“There’s a little flashback, at the beginning of ‘Babylon,’ where you see him fall down the steps, and you see this flashbacks to Adam being born. I was going to dole the story out in these sort of cryptic, ‘Twin Peaks’-esque flashbacks, which I did continue to do.

“But once you had actually seen Adam, and see Don’s relationship with his past, and knew that nobody knew about it and that he wasn’t going to murder for it but he was committed to keeping it a secret and had had that secret for a long time, and maybe more secrets – once you knew that about Don, then I could show you any little piece of it, and you would go, ‘Yeah, of course. Don has no mother. Don doesn’t tell people about himself. Don doesn’t talk about himself in episode 2 and now I know why. It’s not just being a man.’”

And that directly served the tension throughout the season. Seeing him with Adam in ‘5G’ – that adds so much weight to finding out more about his past.

“When Don says, at the end of ‘5G’ – there’s this moment of tension, when Betty says, ‘I need to talk to you about something, it’s serious.’ There’s this look of panic that crosses his face. And she says, ‘I want to go to the house in Cape May.’

“And the last line of the [episode] is, and Jon just looks so devastated, I don’t know how he did it, we didn’t change the makeup but he just looks so beaten and tired. He says, ‘No, that’ll be fine.’ And she says, ‘Good, because I like seeing my dad.’ And [his reaction] to me is always what I was shooting for – this moment when you look at Don and say, ‘This guy has nothing.’”

[We also talked about the soundtrack for the show, which is done by Alexandra Patsavas, who’s behind the soundtracks for “The O.C.,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Gossip Girl,” among other shows.]

“I have a lot of stuff that I wanted to use [for the soundtrack], and I have very particular taste and everything. But what’s really amazing about her is that she got us this huge library of music that we could afford, in addition to nailing down [the usage of] some huge songs for me and also offering incredible creative input.

“When you do the pilot, you don’t get clearances for anything. You just hope it’s going to happen. And I was so married after tremendous searching to “On the Street Where You Live” by Vic Damone. And the estate of Lerner and Loewe is run by a couple of old ladies who don’t even have a DVD player. Everyone was saying, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ Alex came on and pitched me a bunch of other things, and literally within a eight days I had the [Lerner and Loewe] song. I said, ‘What did you do?’ She said, ‘I can’t tell you, but I did it.’

“This was an opportunity for her to go into her music collection. And also, half of her job it – forget about the amazing music that she finds and the creativity and the coolness of all that. There is a business person in there who is negotiating with people, who is a killer. I have so much respect for that.

“Everybody on this show does things for less. It’s a basic cable show and we have to do things for less. So they require a certain amount of pride and being in the cult of the show, especially before there were any reviews or anything nice said about it. And she came along, and one of my greatest pleasures is, we have spotting sessions [where she suggests songs for the show], and I get to be there when she sees the show for the first time. It’s a great pleasure for me because she loves the show. I’ll look over and she’ll be looking down at certain points, and I’ll be like, ‘Was I too hard on Peggy?’ And she’ll be like, ‘It just hurts, it just hurts when I see Peggy sometimes.’[I’ll say,] ‘But that’s good, right? You know I love Peggy, right?’

Spoiler alert

Some information on the finale and on Roger Sterling's future is below.

Stop reading if you don't want to know about this stuff.

[On Betty acknowledging Don’s infidelity in the finale, ‘The Wheel’]

“You know, I’ve been so hard on psychiatrists, but any psychiatrist could look at the show and say, ‘See, it worked!’ Her breakthrough happened with Francine [a friend who found out her husband was cheating on her]. You know that Betty was like, ‘Oh my God.’

“And she goes to Don and gives him a chance to continue in the ruse, and he doesn’t say the right thing. There was a joke, in the sound mix, when Don says ‘Who knows why people do what they do?’ [The sound people put] a big red X over Don, like from ‘Family Feud,’ they did that as a little joke for me. Wrong answer! All you had to do, Don, is say that [Francine’s husband] ‘Carlton is a jerk and I hate him,’ and you didn’t say that. And Betty knew.”

It seemed from the stuff she was telling the psychiatrist, that she’d known all along.

“I think that she had had a realization. She had known all along but she didn’t want to think about it. To me the most devastating thing was when she says, ‘Sometimes he makes love the way I want, sometimes it’s what someone else wants.’”

Does next season take place two years later? I thought I read that somewhere.

“I don’t want to confirm or deny that, because I haven’t really decided yet. You saw where it ended, there’s a chance that could happen. What I really want to do is, we will come in at a place where there is more story to tell. Not just where we left off – that’s for sure.”

Will it still take place at Sterling Cooper?

“Oh yes, I own those sets. And John Slattery will be back. Everybody is coming back, but I don’t want to tell you what year or anything like that.”

Comments

I am so relieved Betty is not just going to another Feminine Mystique stereotype. I was afarid of getting bored.
Rachel's such a fascinating characters, and Don needs her as a foil. I hope she's back too.
It's interesting how isolated Don is, yet he's the one who really listens to others, as in ep.12 when his interactions with Rachel and Peggy helped him decide to stand up to Pete. He may be discriminating, but he's capable of making human connections on a deeper level than any of the other characters.
I've watched AMC all my life. I love this show.

Great review and interview. I'm sure you've written about this before, but what also makes the show brilliant is the art direction, even the sound. Those typewriters, those cigarette lighters, the clicking of the heels.

One very small nit to pick. I don't think you have it right, or the writers have it right about Sal and his hesitance to take that guy up on his pass. See, Sal is *constantly* making these really obvious double entendres that no one notices. Therefore the character would have some self-awareness about being gay. But refusing an invitation from someone he was obviously attracted to, someone who could pretty much guarantee discretion. . . well it might fly if we had come to believe that Sal was miserable and repressed, but that's not how he's portrayed with his glib little remarks. His refusal was out of character.

Mad Men is one of the best shows ever, each episode has my full attention because of the intrigue. I can relate to the show because that was the era I grew up. Hopefully Season 2 will show some of the civil rights activity and expound upon that issue as well. I am sure HBO regrets passing this over for John from Cincy.

Am I the only one who thought that this show is one of the most dull and overrated shows of this entire year? I made it through probably 6 episodes and didn't care about a single thing going on in the show.

Fabulous blog Mo!! I love Mad Men. It's my favorite show of 2007. I completely agree with Weiner about casting the unknowns! It allows the viewer to continue the fantasy that the actor is the character. One small quip: you use Betty's name when you mean Peggy in talking about the Revitalizer and Episode 12. Just a heads up.

Mark, regarding Sal, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I think he was afraid of the repercussions of acting on his feelings. I'm sure he's known he's gay most of his life, but he is just too afraid to do anything about it.

Someone can come off as well adjusted and more or less happy day to day, yet be afraid to act on impulses having to do with sex and desire, especially when those impulses might get him fired, and he knows that full well.

Thanks, Mo. I appreciate your comment.
I do see how he could be petrified of being fired in a way that gay people today (like myself) possibly can't imagine, because in most places it's different now, but then I have one question: how do you explain his constant double entendres? Isn't he playing with fire? Interestingly, and true to your theory, he does go out of his way on occasion to fake heterosexuality, but isn't he worried that one of the guys will pick up on his remarks? See I think the writers have two different characters in mind with Sal: a campy art director, and a super closted, fearful ad man, but they're trying to have it both ways with Sal, because TV typically affords only one major gay character in a series. Let's just see if he doesn't end up dead which is what usually happens, as Vito Russo so brilliantly examined in The Celluloid Closet. Not much has changed, really, on that front.

[Mo here: I take your point. They do seem to go out of their way to make it clear to present-day viewers of the show that Sal is gay. It's abundantly clear that he is. Yet I'm not so sure I agree that he's making constant double entendres. I know he's always making witty remarks, but to me the majority of them don't have a subtext indicating that he's gay. Plus you have to balance those kind of remarks with his willingness to kiss Joan, and do other things that'll make the guys think he's straight. Also, I think the show is just pointing out how clueless most people were in that day and age -- and how little the subject of homosexuality was even broached. The guys at Sterling Cooper probably never mention the topic, and quite literally don't know it when they see it -- or if they do see it, purposely ignore it.

Even Joan, I'd bet, didn't fully realize Sal was gay til he kissed her (that's my guess anyway). She's been an urban professional woman, someone who's been around and is somewhat savvy, yet she either didn't see it or didn't want to see it (as with her roommate).

I find it interesting that the anonymous person at the top who calls his/herself a longtime AMC fan likes "Mad Men." I was afraid that the people who hold grudges over AMC dropping its original classic movie mission (despite the fact that TCM did and does it much better) or the diehard fans of "Remember WENN" (a very overrated series in my view) would use this show as an excuse to shower you with complaints and calls for AMC to return to its old days. Either they've realized that "Mad Men" is a more-than-worthy series for the channel or that it's not any use (and that TCM is the better channel).

I hope that AMC will continue on the original series route. If the shows they put are as classy and high quality as "Mad Men," they will have added much more to the television medium than the umpteenth showing of a Betty Grable musical.

Thanks for the great interview! Mad Men is the best thing on tv right now - I can't believe we will have to wait until next July for a new season. How will we survive?

I appreciated having Mr Weiner give us his insight and thoughts on the characters he created. I was wondering if Betty would explode into a feminist in response to her boredom and neglect, but I see her becoming like Carmela Soprano, unhappy with her husband's lies and infidelities, but grudgingly accepting it all in exchange for a lifestyle that she sincerely *wants*. As for Don? Bring back Rachel and let her torment him. A happy Don is a boring Don.

It will be interesting to see this show - the agency, the couples, the art direction, take on the entire decade - bring on mini skirts, nehru jackets, and The Age of Aquarius. Can't wait.

This was a fabulous article -- I learned so much about the show. I am absolutely obsessed with Mad Men and its portrayal of 60s MadAve. I started working in the mid-70s in banking and everyone was like Pete -- smiling and stabbing your back at the same time. Sure do miss the cigarettes.

Love Mad Men, but hope they don't move the show too far into the future. I love it in the time period it is in, if they move it into the 'civil rights, hippie' 60s, well thats been done SO much. Do you know if they will rerun season 1 before the next season airs???

[Mo here: Not sure if they'll rerun the entire season, but I'd bet they'll rerun at least a few episodes before it returns next year. I agree, the time frame that was chosen for the show was really ideal -- just before everything started changing a ton.]

I get totally absorbed by the blonde furniture, the wardrobes, hair styles, thick plastic-lensed glasses, and make-up,... not to mention the "un-p-c-ness of EVERYTHING! Pregnant ladies, smoking and drinking,... what else, right?
Hat's off too, for the historic crew that dug up the grainy real-life news shots, particularly the Kennedy/Nixon election footage, that draws you in so intently, you want to push even buxom and always deliciously vampy Joanie out of the way to get the very latest election night returns!
"Move, dammit, I want to hear this..."

Wow! Chet Huntley's gotta be NEXT!

Wish AMC could see itself clear, though, to format it WITHOUT COMMERCIAL interruption. Am anxious for the on-demand feature that makes for better viewing. It's just difficult to wait for the weekend after the "original" to air first.

has anyone noticed the background comments? Just after Roger invited himself over for dinner at the bar, Betty ran to answer Don's phone call and one of her kids said "my eyes burn", after clearly just being bathed.

Betty's response, "that's impossible"...buying into the hype that Johnson's Baby Shampoo really does not sting eyes.

Or in the birthday party scene when Don is sitting outside, fully disengaged from the adults, you hear the kids playing in the play house, saying "I LIKE sleeping on the couch" and "I dont like your tone"

Clearly an homage to the 50s/60s arguing styles, where parents would fight in front of the kids.

Too funny :-)

[Mo here: Yeah, that's one of the pleasures of the show -- the tiny details that are just so perfect. I rewatched the last two episodes of the season the other day and enjoyed them as much the second time.]

Maybe it's taken a ton of bricks to fall on me as I read your interview and reflect on the show, but everyone on the show is advertising in a sense. If we define advertising as taking a product- benefits and deficiencies-and finding a way to present the product to others in a favorable light. Don, quite obviously, is a manufactured and polished product, being presented to family, friends and colleagues in a calculated manner. But Betty, Peggy, Sal, Pete, et al are all doing the same thing to certain extents. The amusing this is don't we all do the same thing in real life? We calculate how we present ourselves to different people in our lives. We're all "Mad Men" I suppose.

No, I don't have to forgive AMC for a darn thing; it took these many years for them to reach for quality, instead of commercials?

Nope, I don't have to be happy that a network that set the pace for quality entertainment raced to the bottom of the barrel for nearly a decade, and finally decided to come up for air. If it were a choice between them airing MAD MEN or their continually airing tasteless slasher films, I'd watch MAD MEN on another network, and be glad for the reduction in media pollution.

Bless you Mo for this stuff. What Matthew Weiner has done with Mad Men is what David Milch didn't quite pull off with John From Cincinnatti - the non-linear but compulsive storylines. I can never rewatch Sopranos episodes because 'not knowing what will happen' is so essential to the tension, and the loose ends look like just that. 'Mad Men' has high dramatic tension just because of the characters; you will never get every nuance in one viewing. No wonder some people just don't get it.

I just finished watching the seasn finale and I have to say this is, by far, my favorite show of the summer. I have just been blown away by the depth of the show. I had expected a light but stylish drama, something I would ultimately not pay much attention to. Instead I got what I think we all hope for--TV--entertainment--that takes us someplace. Now I"m kind of worried that none of the fall shows will match this one!!

[Mo here: None of the new fall shows come close to reaching any of Mad Men's many engrossing levels. They're all pallid and boring compared to this. I mean, this is just on a whole different level from pretty much anything out there, aside from a very small handful of shows. I can't believe we have to wait til next summer for episodes -- that's IF there is no writers strike. Argh!]

Someone upthread wondered what is to become of Betty; having once BEEN a Betty and of the same era, I can tell you: she stays in the marriage and takes up redecorating the house, over and over. (And I can't wait for her to re-do that kitchen!) She stays until her kids leave for college and then she runs off with a man the total opposite of Don and lives happily ever after.

Echoing everyone's comments about the show: best thing on TV. What I love most is that the writers respect the intelligence of the viewers. Oh, would that were the case with the REST of network television!

I think everyone's being too hard on Pete. What's great about his character is that yes, he's 85% a spineless worm. But at least he knows it, and despises himself for it. Meanwhile, the other 15% is smart and actually has some good creative instincts. Remember when everyone was mocking JFK for not wearing a hat? Pete astutely replied, "You know who else doesn't wear a hat? Elvis." He's the only one who has a clue that "the times, they are a changing."

Yes, truly a great show that really captures the era. I remember chuckling while watching the gynecology exam with the MD smoking, and no (female) nurse in attendance. Definitely a show that I will be wanting to see again to pick up all the nuances.

I absolutely love Mad Men and think it's the best show on TV right now. I was (and still am) also a huge fan of The Sopranos, and I noticed something while watching the MM finale. In the scene with Betty in her psychiatrist's office there is a statue on the table in the background. I've watched every Sopranos episode numerous times and for some reason I always noticed the statues Dr. Melfi had on the window sills in her office. The statue in Betty's doctors' office looked so similar to one of Dr. Melfi's statues that I can't help but wonder if it's actually a prop from the set of Sopranos. I think it would be sort of a wink to the Sopranos audience, using one of the same statues for both psychiatrists offices. Did anyone else pick up on this?

Enjoyed the article. I am happy to see that Weiner is more focused on providing entertainment than in trying to teach life lessons. In another interview, Weiner spoke about wanting to explore those subjects that really interest him, sexism, the role of women in the workplace, the meaning of masculinity and the like. I took this as a sure sign that I was in for the usual liberal agenda. There's certainly some of it but it's not overbearing. I've read a lot of posts from young viewers saying how glad they are to be living today and not in the horrible 50's. I don't like to see that type of reaction bcause like so many decades, there were some wonderful things in the 50's an early 60's. Weiner doesn't show any however. But I can forgive him that because on the whole, this show is just so damned good! One nit pick though. Weiner prides himself in his character's reacting realistically. I don't care what decade it was in American history. If Campell punched Ken out of the blue, at least one of the guys would ask why.

I watch this show in HD On Demand and it's "Event Television" for me. Savor it.

I love the look and the social dynamic of the early 60's so much, I was hoping Weiner would go year-by-year. Or even do something like an entire season being only a 2-week period. Or one convoluted "Rashomon" day. But I can understand the temptation to jump forward through the 60's. FWIW, w/ each season taking up about a year in the 60's, they're really only skipping a year between seasons. IMHO, Weiner should shoot some flashback material *NOW* that can be used in the last episode when a present day Peggy looks back on it all.

Something that would be a kick to see as a season opener scene (and probably something that Weiner and Co. have thought of already) would be a curtain opening on an Off-Broadway send up of a Sterling-Cooper like ad agency w/ "Jim Jenkins" (Don Draper, wink-wink) as the anti-hero. Of course, the producers would be Draper's beatnik mistress and her anti-Establishment lover from the first few episodes.

AMC started up again with the first episode last night and apparently will follow through to re-broadcast all the episodes in the 10 PM slot on Thursday. Wonderful! I'm an old (former) addie from the 70's in Austin (which is like 1960 in Austin years). The MM story rings so true in all its facets that it has helped me answer some 'what if' questions of my own about that time in my life. As with all things living, there are elements of me and my former partners in all of the characters. I don't miss that life, and find that MM provides an entertaining glimpse of an alternate future that could have led me into a miserable (but better paid) career. Thanks for this detailed look at the things we really love about the show. PS, I think that Robert Morse will be the Emmy winner for this year's effort, as his performance is brilliant, and the voters will be comfortable with giving it to a known actor. GB

I am an oft published author (TV , novel, magazines, newspapers, film). I worked in ad business on Madison Ave.in the '50s.Coincidentally with ther airing of Madmen I happened to have finisied a novel about the ad business in the '50s based on actual people, actual events. Funny, sexua &, serious events.. It would be a goldmine for Madmen. If interested in reading manuscript get in touch. Phone: 858-597-8051, mailiing address: 3890 Nobel Dr., Suite 202, San Diegio, CA 92122, Fax: 858-597-8025. Will supply hold-harmless agreement if requested.
.

Did anyone else notice that Don only sees his mistresses when he is unhappy? I also noticed that he doesn't open up to Betty like he does with Rachel and Midge. Is it because he feels insecure around Betty or does he not want to bother her with his problems? Because i have seen episodes where he is happy and all he wants to do is spend time with his wife and kids. Am I the only one who notices that?

Affiliate links disclaimer:

Clicking on the green links will direct you to a third-party Web site. Bloggers and staff writers are in no way affiliated with these links that are placed by an e-commerce specialist only after stories and posts have been published.